Langston Hughes

One of many talented poets of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s
-- in the company of James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay, Countee
Cullen, and others -- was Langston Hughes. He embraced African-
American jazz rhythms and was one of the first black writers to
attempt to make a profitable career out of his writing. Hughes
incorporated blues, spirituals, colloquial speech, and folkways
in his poetry.

An influential cultural organizer, Hughes published numerous
black anthologies and began black theater groups in Los Angeles
and Chicago, as well as New York City. He also wrote effective
journalism, creating the character Jesse B. Semple ("simple") to
express social commentary. One of his most beloved poems, "The
Negro Speaks of Rivers" (1921, 1925), embraces his African -- and
universal -- heritage in a grand epic catalogue. The poem
suggests that, like the great rivers of the world, African
culture will endure and deepen:

I've known rivers:
I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than theflow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln

went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy
bosom turn all golden in the sunset